Today software systems developers are providing more efficient automated systems for managing the processing of information from multiple, inter-related applications, wherein the applications may be housed on disparate hardware platforms and in diverse locations, and wherein the overall use of computer hardware resources are efficiently managed and the efforts of the users are made more efficient by the reduction of redundant inputs to the multiple disparate but related systems.
Prior art systems of this type typically have an infrastructure which is tightly coupled to application products, specific hardware platforms and specific Operating systems and related services. Such systems are difficult to maintain, difficult to upgrade and difficult to extend to other applications as well as usually requiring redundant data input for their specific applications.
In the past, developers have turned to object-oriented programming (OOP) to improve programming and code maintenance efficiency for such systems and to the use of hardware platform independent languages like Sun Microsystems™ JAVA™ language and system, as tools for developing such platform independent applications support systems. Until recently, the use of Java has been focused on the client side of the client-server system architecture with the development of JavaBeans™ and Java servelet generation. More recently, the technology required to allow distributed objects to communicate with each other across either the client-server or server-server boundary has been provided by the EnterpriseJavaBeans (EJB)™ component architecture. This new architectural system and related tools and systems are well documented and well known to those skilled in these arts. These tools and related systems are described in various whitepapers and tutorials found on the Sun web site at www.java.sun.com as well as in a plethora of books on JAVA and JAVA programming.
However, there remain significant technical problems in crafting a concrete, tangible and useful business applications server which is generally compliant with the EJB architecture specification but which is not bound by vendor specific constraints and which is flexible enough to allow individual business users to add custom data to business objects which are EJB compliant. In addition, business systems are making additional use of the Extended Markup Language (XML) protocol for process communication and data transmission between clients and servers and between servers themselves. Consequently there is a technical need in a business applications server to accommodate XML formatted communications and to accommodate the interchange between Java Business Objects and XML.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a business applications server system and methods which can provide hardware platform independence, but also can provide a metadata process for including user specific data in business objects and for an efficient and useful interchange between Java compliant objects and XML.
The current invention provides these facilities in various new and novel ways as more fully described below.